[mythtvnz] Previously fine WiFi Frontend connection now having regular drop-outs. Common causes?

[Matt Poff]

I'm getting full signal strength and haven't introduced any new 
electronic devices into the house to cause this. However I did a bit 
more searching on the web and came across a few tips, mostly on the 
thread here:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/180429?page=last

As I understand the default encoding bit rate for Myth recordings is 
4500 Kbps and a realistic datarate for 802.11b wireless is 4Mbps (good 
enough for video). I ran some network tests with iperf and could easily 
sustain bandwidth of 5Mbps with  no drop-outs.

One tip suggested ramping down the transmission rate setting on the 
access point router from the default  54 Mbps maximum to something 
smaller to minimise packet loss as MythTV can't tolerate the time it 
takes to do a
TCP retry/resend on bung packets. I set it to 36 Mbps and this seems to 
have worked - no stuttering, no packet resend errors!

In case anyone else is struggling with this, some other things you can 
try (which I haven't needed to) are:

1) Make sure the Myth server is connected by wire to the router. You 
effectively halve your wireless bandwidth if you have frontends and 
backends communicating wirelessly through a router.

2) If all your wireless devices don't support the same protocol don't 
run a 'mixed' wireless network - this will slow the network down. Set 
the router to support the baseline protocol all devices on the network 
are capable of.

3) Try using an NFS mount for Myth recordings instead of relying on the 
backend to stream them. There have been reports that the backend 
streaming has significantly increased overhead compared to the frontend 
playing directly from a file over NFS.


Nathan Cook wrote:
> Have you tried just moving the ibook closer to the AP to see if the 
> problems are solved? If they are you know the wireless signal is weak...
>  
> A microwave or similiar device could also be causing inteferance, but 
> this would be only while it's on.